Indian Air Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009

I saw something about this car on Yahoo. Obviously, air is not the fuel for this car. Something has to compress the air that powers it. My guess is an electric motor that pressurizes a compressor. Have you heard anything about the energy efficiency of this process? That is, do you know if the total energy required to drive the air car the distance of one mile is anywhere near the efficiency of a 30 MPG car? It would be pretty impressive if the air car used less energy to go a mile than is found in one-thirtieth a gallon of gas.

I’m betting the air car it doesn’t give the equivalent energy efficiency of a good gas engine. Even so, if the energy used to generate the electricity is cleaner and local, perhaps the air car is worthwhile.

Funny thing, here where I live there are a couple guys who run their diesel pick-ups on used cooking oil that is discarded by restaurants. Oddly, the used oil burns better in diesel engines than fresh cooking oil. Guys who burn this used oil have to change their fuel filters more often but that is a small price to pay for nigh free transportation. There are politicos hereabouts who are trying to make it illegal to burn untaxed and discarded cooking oil in vehicles. The argument is that persons burning such fuel aren’t paying road taxes when they fill their tanks. If the suits get their way it will mean taxes and fewer cooking oil powered pick-up trucks. That’s a shame because it a lot nicer to drive behind a truck spewing exhaust that smells like French fries (seriously) than the diesel stinkers we are all used to.

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Thanks for your response and your researched answers. It is an exciting idea, and I’d like to air transport in urban and heavily poulated suburban areas.

One of my questions was about energy efficiency. Because the energy must go through two processes, 1. Pressurizing the tanks and 2. Running the car’s motor – it is twice robbed by the incidental inefficiencies of each process. The energy for pressurizing the tanks must come from somewhere. If you live next to a hydroelectric plant and your power is drawn from that, than perhaps the relative inefficiency of twice used energy (assumed by me) is incidental. If your electric energy is obtained from a nuclear or coal plant then perhaps one does less environmental pollution with an energy efficient gas automobile.

Of course, gas doesn’t come out the ground as gas, there is a refining process to make gas and energy is lost in that process as well. I guess what I’m asking is: Which total process is more efficient? And which is cleaner? I don’t know that electricity must be cleaner – although if obtained from wind or water it likely would be. And I suspect that gas is more efficient. These are questions that it would take some patient study to answer clearly, but my point is that the intuitive assumption that an air car is better is not necessarily true.

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Production in India is not yet scheduled. Tata Motors says that the MDI technology is nascent and not yet ready for production in the near future.
http://www.cartradeindia.com/car-bike-news/tata-compressed-air-car-to-take-time-110388.html

Compressed air at 300bar/4350psi has roughly the same energy storage density as regular old lead acid car batteries, and about 1/3 that of NiMH or lithium ion batteries. So for an equivalent sized car, the compressed air car will have only 1/3 of the operating range of a modern electric vehicle.

MDI’s claimed specification for the air car are fantastic. In both meanings of the word. Wonderful, exciting specifications. Also hard to believe.

They would be more believable if MDI hadn’t claimed the same sort of specifications back in 2000, with production cars supposed to have been available in France in 2000, in South Africa in 2002 and Mexico in 2002/2003. See the two BBC articles from 2000: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/988265.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/992431.stm
I don’t know if the Zero Pollution Motors that intended to have productiona air cars in salesrooms in 2002 is the same as the Zero Pollution Motors in the USA, but the parent company, MDI is the same in both cases.

If you look at the MDI website looking for results of tests on their prototype cars, you will find only one page. No longer on the website, but available from the archives at the wayback machine. The actual tested range was only 7.22km (a bit less than 5 miles) before running out of air.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071011200005/http://www.theaircar.com/tests.html

I look forward to seeing if they can ever meet the claimed performance.

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